User talk:ExtregustheSubtle

Gone with the blastwave
A tag has been placed on Gone with the blastwave, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. If you plan to provide more material to the article, I advise you to do so immediately, and also put a note on Talk:Gone with the blastwave. An administrator should check for such edits before deleting the article. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Please read our criteria for speedy deletion, particularly item 1 under Articles. Please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources which verify their content. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material, please affix the template  to the page, and then immediately add such material. Charles 23:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Kimmo lemetti
A tag has been placed on Kimmo lemetti, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable (see the guidelines for notability here). If you can indicate why the subject of this article is notable, you may contest the tagging. To do this, please add  on the top of the page and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself.

Please read the criteria for speedy deletion (specifically, articles #7) and our general biography criteria. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Charles 23:19, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleted page "Gone with the blastwave"
Hi. A page you created, Gone with the blastwave, has been [ deleted] in accordance with our deletion policy.

Wikipedia has certain standards for inclusion that all articles must meet. Certain types of article must establish the notability of their subject by asserting its importance or significance. Additionally, since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, content inappropriate for an encyclopedia, or content that would be more suited to somewhere else (such as a directory or social networking website) is not acceptable. See What Wikipedia is not for the relevant policy.

You are welcome to contribute content which complies with our content policies and any applicable notability guidelines. However, please do not simply re-create the page with the same content; it will be deleted again and may be protected from re-creation. You may also wish to read our introduction to editing and guide to writing your first article. If you have any questions, please contact an administrator for assistance. Thank you – Gurch 23:20, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleted page "Kimmo lemetti"
A page you created, or image you uploaded, Kimmo lemetti, has been [ deleted] in accordance with our deletion policy. In particular, it meets the one or more criteria for speedy deletion; the relevant criterion is:


 * Unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. An article about a real person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject.

Wikipedia has certain standards for inclusion that all articles must meet. Certain types of article must establish the notability of their subject by asserting its importance or significance. Additionally, since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, content inappropriate for an encyclopedia, or content that would be more suited to somewhere else (such as a directory or social networking website) is not acceptable. See What Wikipedia is not for the relevant policy.

You are welcome to contribute content which complies with our content policies and any applicable notability guidelines. However, please do not simply re-create the page with the same content; it will be deleted again and may be protected from re-creation. You may also wish to read our introduction to editing and guide to writing your first article. If you have any questions, please contact an administrator for assistance. Thank you – Gurch 23:21, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Re: Hi.
ExtregustheSubtle wrote:
 * Hi. I decided to start the heading out with "Hi", because you did the same with me.


 * And before I do begin, don't forget to go to bed. It's 23. Humans need sleep.


 * I was messaged 2 before you did by a 37 year old man who calls himself "Charles". He messaged me, I assume, because he thinks I cared. He first requested that my article be deleted, and again for another one. I will confess that I did not read the "Stub" rules, but I had reasoning for why I created those articles. I created them to start them, rather than conceive them. I thought Wikipedia.org was about people editing articles, not 37 year old men named "Charles" who requests topics be deleted minutes after it was created. Therefore, I was rather angry. Not because I was just held down by a loser, but because I really, really saw no reason in the act being committed.


 * I am not complaining about him, I am simply asking why a certain amount of information was needed. I wish to know why one cannot create an entire article, then have someone break it down, rather than add to it and let the site grow a tad more. Please, tell me.

Hi again. You are correct in your assumption that Wikipedia is not about 37 year old men named "Charles" requesting topics be deleted minutes after they were created. That is, however, part of the necessary maintenance work that takes place (though obviously not everyone is called Charles). You are also correct in thinking that Wikipedia is about people editing articles. The key word here, though, is editing – editing existing articles. It is not so much about creating new ones.

When Wikipedia was first founded, and it only had a handful of articles, people weren't too concerned about what was kept and what was not. Because coverage was greatly lacking in many areas, any contribution was appreciated. Originally the idea was to write an encyclopedia with 100,000 articles. In 2001, that seemed like a far-off, unattainable goal. But people put in the effort nevertheless, and it wasn't long before the project grew beyond anyone's expectations. The article count flew past 100,000 and now, of course, we have over fifteen times as many articles, and more or less all significant topics are at covered at least at a rudimentary level.

This creates a problem, though. You may be aware that Wikipedia is commonly perceived to be inaccurate, or at least unreliably accurate; and with good reason. While literally millions of people have contributed content, and tens of thousands more are only too eager to add their bit every day, most contributors simply pick a subject that interests them and add new information, or occasionally remove or modify what is already there. This is fine, of course, and the result is exceptionally detailed coverage of many subjects, especially in popular culture. But it means that the number of regular editors who actively clean up and maintain articles is relatively small. There are just over a thousand administrators, though only a small fraction of those will be active at any one time. There are also many regular editors who are not administrators, but again the number is comparatively small. The project is now literally too large to be properly maintainable by this number of people, which is why false information, badly-written articles and excessive quantities of external links are commonplace.

However, the nature of Wikipedia allows us to try to do something about this. One important feature of the project is that, with a small number of exceptions, the policies and guidelines can be changed, just like the articles. Now that the number of articles has passed a million, the focus has shifted from quantity to quality. The number of articles no longer concerns us nearly as much as the state that the articles we do have are in. And length is not the only indicator of a good article – one of the biggest problems at the moment is that many articles have lots of information but that information is unsourced. Without references, it is not possible to verify the content, and so our reliability suffers.

Another big problem is the need for copyediting. The nature of the wiki system means that many articles are pieced together over time, with each person adding a few sentences of their own. Unfortunately this leads to fragmented articles that, despite being factually correct and sourced, are difficult to follow, and do not flow well when you read through them. The articles have to be copyedited to achieve a more or less uniform presentation throughout the project, and to give each individual article structure and coherence. Not many anonymous, occasional contributors are interested in extensive editing of other people's work, so this is left a small subset of the regular contributors (who are themselves comparatively small in number).

A third problem is the use of external links. Properly used, external links direct the interested reader to other resources that may be useful – sites with more extensive information than can be concisely contained in a single article. However, the popularity of Wikipedia (now one of the 15 most-visited websites worldwide) has led to a rapid increase in the tendency for people and organizations to use it for self-promotion. Linking to a website from Wikipedia increases traffic by attracting visitors to that page, and also pushes the website to the top of search engine results. Wikipedia is frequently at the top of search results itself, further increasing the temptation to exploit that. The same external links are frequently added en masse to multiple articles, some only tangentially related to the content of the target website. For that matter, it is not unheard of for companies' marketing departments to deliberately edit the article about that company to remove any negative information, or even create an entire article consisting solely of promotional material from that company's website. At some point, someone has to go through an article's External Links section and remove links that are inappropriate. This inevitably leads to arguments about exactly which links are appropriate.

Maintaining the quality of articles is a tough task, even before considering what is possibly the biggest problem – bureaucracy. As Wikipedia has grown the policies and guidelines have had to grow with it. Once informal procedures have been turned into an ever more complex set of guidelines, and dozens of processes, committees and subprojects have been set up to keep things running smoothly. Once you start to look beyond the articles, you realize that it's possible to make substantial – and even beneficial – contributions to the project without ever touching an article.

Take for example the deletion policy. Administrators can and have always been able to delete on sight pages that are clearly useless – blank pages, vandalism, nonsense, insults and the like. Over time, the Speedy Deletion policy has been refined and re-refined, and is now a fairly efficient process involving both administrators and non-administrators. There are currently no less than forty-one reasons why a page may be speedy deleted. They even have codenames; the one your article fell victim to is CSD A7, one of the most common speedy deletion reasons. I won't go into too much detail about the remainder of the deletion policy, but there are three other important processes – proposed deletion, Deletion Review and deletion discussions. The last of these is actually subdivided into six separate processes, each of which works in a slightly different way. I think at this stage you start to realize that a considerable amount of effort is expended in keeping these processes going, none of which directly improves the articles. Even I find it confusing at times, after a year of regular editing and six months as an administrator.

So anonymous users and occasional contributors aren't interested in maintenance, and regular editors, while they do their best, are slowed down by bureaucracy and overwhelmed by the size of their task. We currently have cleanup backlogs stretching back to August 2005, and hundreds of thousands of articles tagged as being in need of some sort of attention. Administrators, for their part, are frequently too busy dealing with the things that only they can do (deletion, blocking, page protection) and the things that, as the most experienced users, they are best placed do deal with (such as mediation in content disputes) to do any useful content-related work of their own. Still more time is spent communicating with other users, whether engaging in content-related discussion, trying to settle a dispute, or just explaining to a new user why their article was deleted.

As a result, many of the changes in policy have been effected in an attempt to reduce the amount of bureaucracy, and relieve pressure on overloaded processes, thus allowing content-related decisions to be made more quickly and freeing up more time to work on backlogs. Going back to the deletion policy, any article can be nominated for deletion if a user feels it is not up to standard. To do this, they have to create a page and edit two others, applying a different template to each. Next, other users will discuss whether the article should be kept. After five days of such discussion, an administrator will review the debate, decide either to keep or delete the article, and take appropriate action, again requiring three pages to be edited, and possibly one deleted. This is not a very efficient way to deal with articles when over a thousand new ones, many of which aren't up to standard, are created each day. To solve this problem Proposed Deletion was created, which doesn't require the lengthy discussion, and new criteria are occasionally added to the Speedy Deletion policy, allowing the more obviously unsuitable ones to be removed more quickly. It was once possible for anonymous users to create articles, too; article creation is now restricted to registered users to reduce the number of new articles that are vandalism, or otherwise unsuitable.

In short, our standards are rising. With a million and a half articles in need of improvement, we have certain expectations of new ones. They don't have to be perfect, of course, or even good – the whole point is that someone else can come along and improve it later – but they have to have potential. On the other hand, you don't have to write a new article to contribute. With so many articles, I can guarantee there are dozens on subjects that interest you. Find one, have a quick look through some guidelines and start improving them – and if you're feeling particularly ambitious, try to figure out some of the more convoluted processes. Hopefully this gives you some idea of the situation.

Forget 23, it's nearly 01 now. I still don't need sleep, though – Gurch 00:49, 3 December 2006 (UTC)